Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, COVERAGE, LIABILITY—2d Cir.: Church autonomy doctrine barred former priest’s defamation claims, (Aug 19, 2026)

By Kathleen Kapusta, J.D.

The former priest sued various church entities and individuals in leadership for defamation, claiming that they wrongly accused him of forging letters from church leaders announcing his election as bishop.

Affirming summary judgment against the defamation claims of a former priest in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR), the Second Circuit explained that whatever the merits of his claims, “where an allegedly defamatory statement emerges from a church’s protected investigation into a minister’s conduct and implicates questions of internal church governance, the church autonomy doctrine bars the claim regardless of whether the statement is repeated beyond the church community.” Based on the facts developed in discovery, said the court, “it is clear that [the former priest’s] claims ask us to go where the church autonomy doctrine prohibits courts from entering” (Belya v. Kapral, No. 25-1085-cv (2d Cir. Aug. 18, 2026)).

The plaintiff joined the church as a priest in 2011, serving in its Eastern American Diocese overseeing a parish in Miami. In December 2018, the church’s Synod of Bishops invited him to a meeting to discuss his potential candidacy for a bishopric. According to the church, the Synod determined that it would not advance him until he met certain conditions, including bringing his parish’s property under the authority of the Diocese.

Elected? In contrast, the priest claimed that, after the meeting, several bishops told him he had been elected bishop. He purportedly received two letters confirming his election. Several months later, the website of Moscow Patriarchate, the Russian Orthodox Church within Russia, announced its approval of his election as Bishop of Miami.

Not long after that, he claimed he was told that things had “blown up” at ROCOR over the announcement and that he was being accused of forging letters from the Synod’s First Hierarch, known as the Metropolitan, to the Patriarch of Moscow confirming his election. According to the defendants—the ROCOR, various ROCOR entities, and individuals in the church’s leadership—the letters the Patriarchate received relating to the priest’s election contained numerous irregularities and were forged.

Suspended. The defendants accordingly asked the Metropolitan and the Synod, in a September 3 letter that accused him of “unseemly behavior,” to suspend the priest “from performing any clerical functions” and investigate his conduct. He was immediately suspended and then defrocked in February 2020.

Publication. About two weeks later, the September 3 letter was published on the Facebook page of a former parishioner who stated that the priest could no longer serve because of his conduct, including forgery of the letters announcing his election. In addition, some of the defendants published hyperlinks to news articles related to his disputed election.

Lawsuit. The former priest sued the defendants for defamation, defamation per se, and defamation by implication. The defendants moved to dismiss, arguing that the court could not resolve the case because it involved nonjusticiable ecclesiastical issues under the First Amendment’s church autonomy doctrine. Rejecting that contention, the court explained that while the First Amendment “forbids civil courts from interfering in or determining religious disputes,” it “does not bar claims if they may be resolved by appealing to neutral principles of law” and, at the pleading stage, it appeared that the former priest’s suit could be resolved through “neutral principles,” as his claims “center[ed] on Defendants’ allegations that he forged the various letters at issue that led to the confirmation of his election.”

After an appeal to the Second Circuit ended in remand, the case proceeded to discovery and the district court, concluding that the former priest’s claims were premised only on the portions of the September 3 letter that implied that he had forged the letters regarding his election, granted summary judgment to the defendants based on state defamation law and the First Amendment. As to the First Amendment, the court concluded that summary judgment was warranted because resolving his claims on the merits would require a jury to evaluate issues of “core church functions,” including “the proper election procedures of ROCOR bishops; what was said among senior church leaders about church disciplinary procedures; and communications among senior clergy about internal church governance.”

Church autonomy doctrine. On appeal, the Second Circuit noted that the church autonomy doctrine, which is also referred to as the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine, ensures “that religious associations have ‘independence in matters of faith and doctrine and in closely linked matters of internal government.’” While it does not provide religious institutions with “a general immunity from secular law,” it does protect such institutions from civil liability predicated on “internal management decisions... essential to [their] central mission.”

As relevant here, said the court, “the Supreme Court recognized in Hosanna-Tabor, the doctrine prevents the adjudication of claims that would necessarily interfere with a church’s ability to select, supervise, and terminate its employees who serve an ‘important religious function[]’ (i.e., its ministers).” Further, the court observed, “[a] religious body’s motivation for taking an [employment] action protected by the First Amendment can be purely ecclesiastical, secular as well as ecclesiastical, or secular instead of ecclesiastical.”

Speech. Church officials, the court observed, must also be free to engage in speech regarding their protected employment decisions without fear of liability. Thus, it is no surprise, said the court, “that courts before and after Hosanna-Tabor have found that the church autonomy doctrine bars defamation claims based on communications made as a part of a church’s discipline and termination of its ministers.”

Here, the court found the church autonomy doctrine barred the former priest’s claims because they interfered with ROCOR’s autonomy in selecting, supervising, and terminating its clergy and because evaluating the merits of his claims would impermissibly require a jury to address numerous questions regarding ROCOR’s governance and protocols for selecting bishops.

Internal publication. As to his claims stemming from the individual defendants’ initial internal publication of the September 3 letter to the Synod, the court noted that the defendants were all members of the Eastern American Diocese leadership, they sent the letter to the Synod, another leadership body within the church, the letter presented the results of their’ investigation into the priest’s elevation to the bishopric and accused him of disqualifying behavior, and the letter was the product of an investigation they undertook as part of their supervision of ROCOR’s ministers.

“Thus,” said the court, “even assuming that the letter contained false statements and that those falsehoods were of a secular sort that hypothetically could be resolved based on non-religious evidence, the context of the letter’s initial publication places it squarely within the protection of the church autonomy doctrine.” Further, allowing judicial review of the investigation’s results, “would impermissibly interfere with” ROCOR’s authority “to regulate the character and conduct of its leaders,” and would render “[t]he First Amendment’s protection of internal religious disciplinary proceedings... meaningless.”

In addition, the court stressed, resolving the merits of the former priest’s claims would entangle a jury in church protocols and governance such that the church autonomy doctrine would apply regardless of his status as a minister. A jury resolving his claims would be required to make factual findings regarding ROCOR’s election practices and would have to assess the good faith and correctness of the defendants’ positions as their church’s practices and beliefs.

For example, the court explained, to determine whether the September 3 letter’s forgery accusations are false, a jury would have to make factual findings about how ROCOR’s bishops are elected and how those elections are conveyed and affirmed. Similar issues would arise in litigating the element of fault, said the court.

Facebook posts. As to the former priest’s claims regarding the Facebook posts that circulated the September 3 letter, while he argued that the posts and the articles to which they hyperlinked defamed him as a forger to the world outside of ROCOR’s leadership, they did so exclusively in the context of his supposed election as bishop. As a result, the court observed, any claims based on the Facebook posts were inextricably intertwined with ROCOR’s decision to investigate its own clergy and with ROCOR’s own understanding of its protocols and governance and could not be severed from those contexts.

While the court acknowledged that some courts have indicated that the church autonomy doctrine may not bar adjudication where a defamatory statement was made by church leaders to audiences outside their religious community, it declined to address the merit of that principle “beyond noting the difficulty of line-drawing between internal and external publication.” In the factual context of this case, said the court, “we can and do conclude only that, where an allegedly defamatory statement emerges from a church’s protected investigation into a minister’s conduct and implicates questions of internal church governance, the church autonomy doctrine bars the claim regardless of whether the statement is repeated beyond the church community.”

The case is No. 25-1085-cv.

Judge: Lynch, G.

Attorneys: Oleg Rivkin (Rivkin Law Group) for Alexander Belya. Diana Verm Thomson (The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty) and Donald J. Feerick, Jr. (Feerick Nugent MacCartney) for Hilarion Kapral aka Metropolitan Hilarion, Nicholas Olkhovskiy, Victor Potapov, Serge Lukianov, David Straut, Alexandre Antchoutine, George Temidis, Serafim Gan, Boris Dmitrieff, John Does 1—10, Eastern American Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, The Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside or Russia, Mark Mancuso, and Pavel Loukianoff.

Companies: Eastern American Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia; The Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside or Russia

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